Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Hugh Pickens writes "The U.S. Bill of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including a fair and speedy jury trial, but in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation's prison population has quintupled in a few decades — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury, in part because the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. 'The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,' says Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. Now Susan Burton, head of 'A New Way of Life' (PDF), is helping to start a movement to demand restoration of Americans' basic civil and human rights by asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. 'Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?' Burton says if everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation."

Don't worry, after a few months of litigation you too can be indigent.

That's a joke. The reality is that, yes, a jury trial is MUCH more expensive than taking your lawyer's plea agreement -- unless you calculate in your time in prison, etc.

The real issue is that you actually CAN be punished for demanding a jury trial -- the sentence will be heavier -- this is tailored as "lack of remorse" essentially -- you're still claiming innocence!? You aren't facing up to your criminal liability. Add time.

There's a dilemma there for me. Those who truly show remorse should, in an ideal world, be treated more leniently - they are more likely (again, in a ideal world) to go on to become productive members of society. But should we further punish those who maintain their innocence simply for doing so, even if it it is in the face of overwhelming evidence?

.

I guess it all boils down to it still being possible - not to suggest justice is inherently flawed, just imperfect - to be convicted of a crime one did not commit.

Which just goes to show that the court system in America is not accessible to everyone. It's tailored to the rich, those that have already been convicted of something, and people who are already lawyers. It's a damn travesty.

My favorite lawyer got hit with some trumped up charges and plea bargained himself into jail for a year rather than risk a jury trial - he should know better than most which decision was in his best interests.

If all defendants banded together and chose to fall on the knife simultaneously, yes it would crash the system. Good luck getting even 1% of defendants (who weren't already crazy enough to go to jury trial) to try that.

As it stands, trial by jury is the option for people with nothing left to lose - if your plea bargain leaves you with some semblance of a liveable life, you're better off taking it than rolling the dice against what is usually a 10x worse option. I wonder what the founding fathers would have wanted instead of the plea bargain system, because this surely isn't what they had in mind.

That's why nowadays you cannot assume that a large majority of those in jail are guilty. Given the way the system works, many innocent people can be convinced that it is in their best interests to plead guilty.

Scenario: You blew a.04% on the breathalyzer and showed a.03% on the blood test, but you swerved. We have it on video. You also stumbled when we asked you to walk the straight line during the field sobriety test, never mind that it was twenty degrees out and we didn't let you put your jacket on and we drew the line right beside a busy interstate. We have this on video too. We can make a deal where you lose your license for a year, pay ten grand, take some classes, and are on probation for a year...or you can take it to trial and go to jail for a year. During that time, your girlfriend will see other men, you'll lose your pets, most of your possessions, and come out pretty much bankrupt from all the bills you weren't able to pay. Your move.

You, sir, have no idea of how that's applied. If you have a job, they say you can afford a lawyer. Even if all of your income is taken by rent/mortgage, utilities and food. If you have any income, you *can* afford a lawyer and are assumed to be refusing to pay for one.

You really must be indigent to get a free lawyer and those usually aren't that good.

Why was this modded up to 4 - "Interesting?" I would look up the requirements (i.e. lack of income requirement) for access to the public defender system in your state. In Wisconsin for example --- if you make >$260\week you are not allowed a public defender and have to provide your own council. Let's see -- $260\week -- assuming you never take any vacation -- thats less than $14K a year........basically -- you have to be EXTREMELY poor before you are given access to a public defender...and its worse in some states.

Also - I agree that coercing defendants to settle does happen -- in criminal and civil cases -- but the dockets of courts around the country are already filled -- so sure, we can "break" the system -- but unless you're willing to fight for another century to rebuild the entire judiciary -- its pointless. The reality is, trials are expensive, they suck, depending on the jurisdiction -- you may already be screwed (so settlement is your BEST option), and most people don't have the wherewithal or resources to carry a case through to final judgment.

I have no idea what the answer is -- as I see it, there is no fix or magic bullet...but, demonizing settlement of cases, or plea bargains -- is not the answer. And nor is forcing a trial on someone who will most likely be indebted for the rest of their lives paying legal and court fees -- there is no justice in that -- and in many cases -- it is a worse fate than would have come out of settling.

Actually there IS a magic bullet, its called "get rid of sin crimes" and treat adults like adults. The late William F Buckley said a perfect explanation once, sorry if i don't get the quote exact but it went like this: "If I put a bottle on a table that says poison and has a skull and crossbones on it and i tell you 'this is poison, it will destroy your health, destroy your family, before it finally destroys you' and you push me out of the way and gulp the bottle straight down? Well stupid you frankly are too ignorant to live! why should I spend billions to build cages to put you in and armed guards around the bottle because you are too dumb not to drink it?"

Gambling, prostitution and drugs should ALL be legal and regulated, no different than booze is now. Personal responsibility means being able to choose stupidly as well as smartly and if you removed non violent offenders out of the system you wouldn't have this problem...

But here is the REAL truth, ugly and sick such as it is, the elite have figured out how to make money off those poor by locking them up, both by privatizing the prison system and with prison labor, not to mention all the traditionally mafia style rackets like concessions Prisons and the prison system are billion dollar businesses and they give the elite the added bonus of stripping the rights away from a large section of the minorities so it is a win/win for them.

Well right up until we have an Arab spring, which i figure we will have in the next decade, right around when unemployment hits 50% and the crime shoots through the roof because all these millions of uneducated poor can't feed themselves because all the factories were sent to Asia and all the manual labor given to illegals. Somehow I doubt power will be transferred as nicely as it was in the old USSR, it'll probably be more like Libya which with the amount of firepower the USA has spread out all over the country should give anyone nightmares. But hopefully when the final round has been fired we will go back to a more strict constitutional government where people are treated like adults again and the corps aren't allowed to become destructive monsters like they are now.

There are exactly two parts in every law book that have no touch with reality: Sex and drugs.

And it's only two because nobody ever bothered with rock'n roll.

Quite seriously, these are the two parts of every civil law book that plain out don't make any sense. I can see the point in everything else, since it usually involves two parties, a culprit and a victim. In these two parts, they're usually rolled into one. Kinda like the law trying to protect you from yourself.

And IMO that's now the law's prerogative. I should have the right to ruin my life in the way I prefer. Once you let me vote and enter other contracts perfectly able to ruin my life forever, I should also have the right to ruin it in a more pleasurable way.

Rules and Regulations for Public Dance Halls [thesocietypages.org] ("no beating of drum to produce jazz effect") and also, Nazi hatred for jazz [theatlantic.com] (I think this one is my favorite: "so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs)"...)

I generally agree with the legalization argument, but you're oversimplifying things. Many things are illegal only partially for the damage they allow you to do to yourself. The abuse of many substances could/would also have a widespread negative effect on society. Just as we restrict "liberty" by forcing all children to go to school in order to promote an educated society, we should also restrict liberty by preventing people from using highly addictive drugs like opiates.

An interesting take, straight out of "Hugs not Drugs!" But also utter bullshit.

Legalization leads to less abuse by youths, and less abuse overall, lower rates of addiction, and less overall harm.

If you're really trying to "protect" people from dangerous drugs and their ill effects on society, you should be working to legalize or decriminalize just about everything, since the Netherlands experiment shows pretty conclusively that young people have less access to drugs in a legalized marketplace (because black marketeers don't check ID) there's less experimentation among youth, less addiction among youth, and less addiction overall in society. Overall, fewer people take drugs in the Netherlands now that they're de facto legal.

You fucking sicken me. The reason the dockets are filled is because of bullshit non-crimes and non-criminals being prosecuted for every little bit of bullshit out there. The US imprisons more people than any other country on earth, both by percentage and by raw number, yes, even China, with over 1 billion people, has fewer people in prisons than the US. That is not because our people are worse, hell no, it is because we put fucking everyone in jail for anything we can possibly think of.

The system needs to have a damn wrench shoved between the gears, so that this disgusting problem comes to light and we do something about it. Not to mention your condescending attitude and the whole "just deal with it as is, don't even think about bucking the disgusting system" What the fuck is wrong with you.

Only reason I'm AC is because I forgot my account password, as I hadn't signed in in months when the FBI took my computers because I was involved in protesting Koch Industries. I worked on a damn boycott, argued against illegal activity, was a damn good citizen, and they busted in my door, stomped on my back, threatened my life, and took everything I had. The United States is the most oppressive country in the "civilized" world, if you can call us even remotely civilized, when our police behave more like those of Syria than that of a real civilized nation.

Just getting ACCUSED of something can bankrupt you. Guilt doesn't enter it. Just like in the civil court system, big companies mostly use the legal system as a bludgeon, burying opponents in paperwork and attorney's fees regardless of truth or merit of any lawsuit.

I let many companies and people abuse me because I couldn't afford time or attorneys to take them to court. Then I turned my attention to learning enough to be competent enough to put a stop to that. Way overdue.

People should be comfortable representing themselves more. Perhaps not for a crucial criminal trial, but for everything else it should be considered. Basics of the legal system and navigating it should be taught in high school. The fact is that you can combat many opponents well if it costs you next to nothing and they feel they have to pay a lot for attorneys. True to some extent even for well-funded opponents in some circumstances. A major problem is that a lot of information, like process / procedures / formats, is hidden, but you can get it eventually.

I've successfully run a couple civil actions and successfully contested a couple low-level parking / traffic tickets. I just appealed one in California Appellate court, raising some interesting (to me) constitutional issues. (Waiting for my loss letter...) Good to do A) to work out the details of the process, B) to learn the law better, and C) protest annoying and not-helping-safety/society abuse of laws to meet a quota. I even recently figured out the details of filing citizen's arrest requests to maximally complain about a very dangerous, and illegal, maneuver of a CHP to give someone a speeding ticket. The officer was the only unsafe driver I saw between SF and SJ. (Next time, I'll get positive ID.)

In California, additional "fees" were added to traffic tickets that make a typical speeding ticket >$500 and really minor infractions start at $240. That's enough to be worth contesting at every point. In fact, it may be enough to change the rules of evidence in some cases.

I need to populate my pro-se site soon with some of these as examples, if people are interested.http://pro-se.org/ [pro-se.org]And yes, I want to attack the overbroad "unlicensed practice of law" statutes that exist in 49 states. Of course you can't fraudulently hold yourself out as a bar-certified lawyer, and you shouldn't (can't, according to those laws) give people advice about what they should do. (The latter makes sense in a narrow sense: Besides what the law means, and what past cases have found, to actually advise people, you should know what the local custom, practices, probabilities, leanings, etc. the local judges and prosecutors have. That is separate from talking about the law or your own experience or analysis / opinions. First amendment rules there. That's the best I can understand the real legal line for conduct.) People aren't confused about who is a doctor just because they suggest that you eat better, get exercise, and take Ritalin or whatever. It is a ridiculous abuse of the public to enact laws so clearly designed to prevent sharing of information to protect blessed professionals.

And that isn't even figuring in what happens when someone in the system just decides to get your ass, be it a vendetta or because they are too lazy to catch the real criminal or just because its Tuesday. true story..

We had a prosecutor in our county the cops called "that God damned bitch" for about 4 years, the reason she had that name? Simple if you had a penis you were guilty, period. women were innocent, men were guilty and God fucking help you you got investigated for ANY things sexual as she would tear into you like a pitbull tearing into a t-bone, all because she was raped in college and it seriously warped her. A friend lost a home that had been in his family 3 generations, built by his grandfather before WWI, all because of the GDB. it was a nasty divorce, he found she was banging two different docs at the hospital she worked at and he made it damned clear he was gonna fight for his kid so she got the 16 year old stepdaughter to say he grabbed her tits. Now it didn't matter that the cops actually went into court on his side, that they had written and testified the case was bogus, the girl had changed her story no less than 5 different times and never came close to telling the same story twice and that at least on one occasion they caught grandma coaching her (which GDB refused to prosecute). Nope none of that mattered as she came up with every charge she could think of and drug it out for over 2 years. By the time it was over the jury took less than 20 minutes to find him not guilty but in the meantime he had lost his job, his home went for lawyer bills and after she cleaned his account she hired a lawyer (which he couldn't afford one after this) and got full custody of his son and promptly took him out of the country, never shall he see his son again.

so don't think because you have a decent job now that will help you if someone decides to crush you like a bug. it amazed me how no matter how insane the charges were or the fact even the cops said it was completely fabricated this one GDB could completely and utterly destroy a person's life like that. And of course now he doesn't have 2 cents to rub together so good luck getting her for malicious prosecution, which wouldn't give him back his son anyway which he hasn't seen in 14 years now and probably wouldn't even recognize if he ran into him on the street sadly.

They booed Ron Paul when he said we should follow the Golden Rule in foreign policy. (Treat others the way you would want to be treated - do not bomb and kill them.) So called Christians often don't follow their own principles. I was surprised to discover the rate of premarital pregnancy and divorce was actually HIGHER among church-going Christians then the general population.

I was surprised to discover the rate of premarital pregnancy and divorce was actually HIGHER among church-going Christians then the general population.

It's not really a surprise when you think about it. A lot of well-meaning (but naive) Christians raise their kids in a heavily sheltered environment. Then they turn 18, go out on their own, and receive the shock of their lives when they are suddenly confronted with decisions they were never prepared to face. It's not a surprise that as young adults, they would engage in risky behavior like casual unprotected sex.

A laundry list of "dos and don'ts" doesn't build character or cultivate wisdom, it just prohibits. It transmits little or no understanding and even less ability to reason through a situation and make good decisions. Such religious prohibition combined with severe social stigma may have mostly worked during the 1950s, among the Puritans, and during the Victorian Era, but there aren't so many external restraints governing consenting adults anymore. I consider that a good thing, but it doesn't produce good results if there is no internal decision-making that can plan ahead and evaluate risk.

If the inability to evaluate cause-and-effect in order to consider the ramifications of one's decisions is a disease, I say we are suffering a pandemic. Doing whatever feels good in the moment with no thought to secondary and tertiary effects sounds great but it doesn't result in a life that most people would want to be stuck with.

Speaking of your discovery, have you ever met a woman who is a pastor's daughter? They have quite the reputation. Sure it's a stereotype, but it has some basis in fact.

I have a conservative relative who was an OB/GYN nurse who once said she did feel free condoms and birth control should be in high schools, and my mother just about had an aneurism. The logic was that she had seen all these pregnant teens and that high schoolers are a mix of bad judgement and high hormones. Yes you want to drive your car safely but you're a fool if you don't use a seat belt. Just like seat belts don't make you drive like an idiot, availability of birth control doesn't make you go out and have sex and lack of birth control doesn't make you not have sex.

So in that sense I don't think it's really hypocritical that there is a higher premarital pregnancy rate in Christian communities. It's just fallout from a blind belief that abstinence programs actually work, that "my child is a good child and nothing bad will happen to them" belief that haunts so many parents, a horrified thought whenever Planned Parenthood wants to give a talk at the schools, etc. Just like most communities, Christian, atheist, democrat, republican, minority, etc, there are a few really loud influential people who drive the way most people think (or don't think). As stupid as it is for someone to just believe whatever World Net Daily tells them without thinking, it's also just as stupid for people to say "I heard that X is politically incorrect so we should avoid that". Just not enough people make up their own minds in preference for letting others tell them what to think.

I'm not a Ron Paul fan and a lot of his ideas are extremely goofy. But I do admire a politician who knows what he thinks and says it when he knows it won't be popular.

Yes you want to drive your car safely but you're a fool if you don't use a seat belt. Just like seat belts don't make you drive like an idiot, availability of birth control doesn't make you go out and have sex and lack of birth control doesn't make you not have sex.

I always wear my seat belt, and think condoms should be given away in schools. However this statement reminded me of something interesting, the fact that seat belts may well cause you to drive more dangerously.

This raises an interesting devil's advocate argument against birth control in schools. Wikipedia tells me that "women whose partners use male condoms experience a 2% per-year pregnancy rate with perfect use and a 15% per-year pregnancy rate with typical use" (the pill has an 8% failure rate with typical usage). Also, consider that incorrect usage is probably much higher among highschool students. With that in mind, what might be the effect of a false sense of security given by condom usage? The risk of pregnancy is pretty obvious without a condom (or another birth control method), but if people think that condoms are going to completely eliminate that risk, while only reducing it to 15% or so, might that actually lead to overall increased pregnancies? Consider that if we take the probability of not getting pregnant in a year with typical condom usage at.85, and figure four years of condom usage it gives a total probability of 0.85^4 = 0.52. This means that about half (48%) of couples will end up with a pregnancy at some point during those four years.

One might argue that this just means we must couple distribution with thorough education about proper usage. However, this might not be very realistic, particularly in areas where there would be resistance to giving out birth control in the first place.

I know it's fun to hate on anything that becomes well known (maybe they don't believe as you do - those BASTARDS!) but do you actually know anything about them?

Actually, yes, I do since they took over my town's fourth of july celebration.

They're a bunch of racist Birthers.They love to get drunk and shout "go back to Mexico" at anyone that looks remotely latino.They claim to be about "reducing the size, power, and involvement in daily life of government" until the moment you suggest touching the programs they use, like food stamps, medicaid, and free public "education" (that they nevertheless refuse to vote to adequately fund while screaming about taxes 99.999% of them won't ever have to pay unless they hit the lottery).

Framing: it's a way to lie gruesomely without ever saying something false.

Framing: I know racist ass-hats when I see them, and where I live, the Tea Party is nothing but racist ass-hats who found a new way to appear "respectable" to idiots like you who are too stupid to notice it's the same old crowd, just without the white hoods.

They are all about reducing the size, power, and involvement in daily life of government. If they got what they wanted you wouldn't "quintuple the prison population" in a few decades which would avoid this problem. I think that privatizing the police and courts would accelerate the rate of imprisoning people just as reducing the size of the part of government that runs the prisons has driven the quintupling of the size of the prison population that was mentioned in the summary. It is not the government that is profiting off of the large prison population (besides the campaign funding).

The tea party may have originally been about reducing government size, power and daily involvment of the federal government but I'm not sure that's been the case for a long time. My ex-boss was a tea party guy; hard core. After listening to him many, many times I can very definitively tell you he is more anti-liberal than anti-big government. He worships Glen Beck, thinks Obama is a socialist anti-Christ in cohoots with Soros, out to destroy America, and that all of our problems started when the US took prayer out of school. I was at the airport with him one time and some random guy came up, shook his hand and they started talking. (He was wearing one of those pro-tea party shirts.) They weren't talking about how to solve big government; they were just circle jerking about how liberals are the cause of all of our problems and how we should go back to daily religion (Christian only because "the US is a Christian nation") in every aspect of our lives. He's not an idiot mind you, I like the guy, but guys like Beck and other conservatives have zeroed in on the natural fears that most people have and convinced them to not even talk or listen to any other opinions. It's not about making America great, it's only about beating the liberals no matter the cost.

I have yet to see anything that actually shows tea party people are about smaller government more than drinking the "liberals are what's wrong with America" cool-aid than anything else.

You can't just say "I can't afford an attorney". If you have any money in the bank, or if you have a job, or both, you don't get a court-appointed attorney.

Well, if you're willing to be a test case, and willing to sit for awhile (a long time) in jail, refuse to retain a lawyer on your own dime, and refuse to forfeit your right to representation. Without refusing to forfeit your right to representation, the court likely cannot constitutionally proceed without appointing a lawyer to represent you.

Of course, you would also probably have to sue and appeal to get the judgement in your favor, which would require a lawyer...

That's a nice rosy thought, but the ability to afford an attorney for trial has nothing to do with your budgetary capability of paying for one, it is all about how poor you are and like many social services, you have to be very VERY poor in order to have an attorney appointed for you. If you don't meet the financial requirements then the state has NO OBLIGATION whatsoever to provide you with an attorney because hey if you really really wanted to, you could not pay your rent for a month or two to keep yourself out of jail. If you can't afford an attorney and one will not be appointed for you then you are on your own. Want to go ahead anyway? Well, there are a long series of rules and procedures you have to follow in order to represent yourself in a proper manner and you have to know that the prosecution is under not obligation to help you in any way shape or form. "You didn't see that piece of evidence? Well it's been here the whole time for you to look at" etc. The american justice system is of, by, and for the wealthy and they are often the only ones that can afford to go to trial which is why more often than not they get off Scot free.

Maybe a better plan is for the state to allot the same amount for a defense as they allot for a prosecution. You can still hire your own attorney if you want, but the poor and middle class are far less likely to get overcharged in order to settle. Seems very fair to me, and it keeps prosecutors from bringing BS cases. Might solve all of the problems. Every case is proceeded by a cost, benefit analysis.

and my attorney advised that a trial would be more expensive, so i should just settle

really?

That's really fucking sad.

Really.

Justice is only for the rich, apparently.

I don;t know what to say other than, Eat the rich.

And for you fuckers who are going to say, "I have never gotten a job from a poor person."

Well, I have. He was a poor bastard who got a painting contract and hired a bunch of us fellow poor bastards. He kept doing it. He's non rich but he's got a painting business that pays his bills and gives him a decent living and gives jobs to others when he has them.

Poor people do give folks jobs and in this day and and age of offshoring, they give more jobs than BIG CORP who will insist that they can't "find any qualified Americans" to fill their positions.

So - who in the hell ARE these small business people? Well, I was one. I went into a partnership, which was later dissolved for personal/family reasons. Poor people, who scrounge for the cash to purchase tools, equipment, and supplies, and to rent building space. Poor people who hire other poor people. And, if they keep up the struggle for long enough, and if they are smart and lucky, then they move further up the food chain, so that they are no longer poor.

I've seldom had a rich man give me a break. Poor folks are always willing to give another poor man a break! Even hardened criminals are more likely to lend a hand when you need it, than some rich sumbitch with a yacht.

"Self-represented defendants are not bound by lawyers' ethical codes. This means that a defendant who represents himself can delay proceedings and sometimes wreak havoc on an already overloaded system by repeatedly filing motions."

My mother once tried to represent herself in court, over some business thing. She was berated by the judge, told that she couldn't do that and he was considering throwing her in jail for contempt of court. That's bullshit, obviously, but it goes to show how the system really works. Your "rights" are only what the cops and judges decide they will humor you with at the time.

Been there, done that. I got falsely accused of speeding. Honestly. Long story short, the COP confused me with someone else that blew by me going 90 MPH while I was humming along between 65 and 70. Anyways, I was so adamant at fighting the system that I decided to represent myself via trial by judge. What that a fucking mistake. The fucking workthless pig showed up and the judge hardly gave me any time to make my case. You see, I didn't speak legalese. Effectively, I had no voice and thus was not heard. No matter what. I was a peniata. A fat fish in a small barrel being shot at with RPGs. I cannot stress how sad it was to be forced to remain mute while being humiliated in front of the jury. Oh, and the jury? Combined IQ maybe passed 90 if I was lucky. Fucked either way!

I did the same thing many years back. If you really want to see how the legal system works challenge a speeding ticket in court. You think you have rights and the judge is impartial? Go to a trial and watch them break all the laws and trample those rights. I am totally serious even the most simple and basic things go out the window. The Judge and prosecutor are on the same team and you have little to no chance to even make a valid case. They will also threaten you with contempt of court and deny you the opportunity to video tape the proceedings (to show others what the system really is like). It was a great $200 real world lesson for me and I recommend it to everyone. That way you know the reality of the system you are living under not the illusion like most people have.

I have a friend in the middle of a lawsuit. She didn't have the $100k in up front costs so she is representing herself (I know civil, not criminal, a different world, but some lessons still apply)

In her first two court dates in front of a judge she got to say next to nothing and was just ruled against.

In her third filing she put in a bunch of citations about the rights of self represented litigants, and the duty the court owes them.

The same judge that more or less didn't let her talk in the first two hearings, bent over backwards to make things fair, and when she had not prepared a notice, ordered the Lawyer for the other side to draw it up for her.

The moral, judges are used to lawyers telling them the law, and therefore if you want a judge to respect your rights, you have to explain your rights to the judge, and why the judge has to respect them, otherwise its, "Next case. We have a lot get through today".

"Self-represented defendants are not bound by lawyers' ethical codes. This means that a defendant who represents himself can delay proceedings and sometimes wreak havoc on an already overloaded system by repeatedly filing motions."

You can ask a judge to make some reasonable allowances for your ignorance of proper procedure.

The unspoken assumption there is that you were going to lose the criminal case, so they money and time you'd spend on the jury trial would be wasted.

That's not always the case. In some unknown but probably large fraction of cases, the DA not only wants to bypass the trial because it saves him money and effort, but he also doesn't have enough evidence to assure a conviction. He's pretty sure you did it -- enough to put your ass in jail --- but not so sure he can meet the standards of proof that a jury trial would require. So he tries to frighten and bully you into going to prison.

To assess whether this is a good idea, you need a good lawyer and you need to tell him or her all about the evidence that the state has -- and might have -- against you. Then the attorney can make something of an informed assessment of:

1. What it is the state will likely charge you with -- you can't believe the DA -- he's trying to bully you.2. How likely it is, given what you know about the evidence, that the state can prove its case in court. You can always reassess after discovery.3. The range of likely sentences you would get if convicted on each count.4. How much of your money and time this is likely to eat up assuming a vigorous defense.

And there's a tactic you can sometimes use in your favor. Some cases are complicated and could take a long time to prepare. Or they could be in busy offices and get lower priority than higher-profile or more serious cases. In that case, you may have an advantage by demanding a *speedy* trial. It's your right. That means either the state has to put aside other cases to prepare yours for trial sooner or it has to go ahead with a case that's less fully prepared and your chance of acquittal may be improved.

I honestly hate to go into this because you're right for the most part but most cases in the average metropolitan area have overwhelming evidence. The problem is is that the DA, the courts, and the Public Defender's office all have limited resources. So even if you have ten security cameras, three eye witnesses, prints on the weapon, and an arm's length rap sheet it could still take days into weeks to present it to a jury. So instead the DA gives a semi-lenient sentence to avoid having to waste valuable resources on a low-level crime (drugs, GTA, GTL, or a non-violent crime) while spending on the violent ones.

The hands full of people who get charged with criminal offenses who can afford real legal defenses are usually the ones that the DA does want to go after because they tend to be the more violent and society-threatening (business owner/pillar of community murders his wife). The source material reinforces what we've known about the system for years. The dramatic increase actually occurred with the rise of CCTV and security cameras. Ironically the police didn't get better so much as technology made it more feasible to catch even the most mundane crime that would have been unsolvable 30 years ago. Then again a large portion of our prison population should be in rehab centers and mental institutions not prisons but that's an argument for another day.

Maybe it depends on the state, but in my state you have to have a sufficiently low income to be represented for free. And your income has to be very low indeed. The problem with public defenders is not that they are incompetent (although they often only recently passed the bar exam), but that they have too high a case load to give your case sufficient attention. At least that's what I've heard. I met the income requirement, but was able to borrow the money for a private attorney. I'll be in debt for a long time though because the fee is about 3/4 of my annual income. To me it's worth it if it gives me a better chance of staying out of jail, but the price is very steep indeed.

I used to do some public defense work. Here's how plea bargains often went -- your choice was to (a) accept a plea to this minor included offense, pay restitution (money) to the victim, pay a charge to the court and the cost of your arrest and court fees; or (b) go on trial for the felony crime you may have committed (questionable), risk jail time, risk major and permanent alteration in your status and rights as a citizen (i.e. no right to vote, no guns, etc).

Quick, you're innocent -- which do you choose? Remember, jury trials are a crap-shoot to start with, and the dice are loaded against you if you're brown and poor.

Having been in such a position in the past , you are absolutely spot on. My times were lower, but:

1) plead guilty to 3 domestic violence charges that were absolutely ridiculous and get out on time served , 43 days, 2 years 'probation'.

2) face jury trial, looking at 3-4 years.

Simply the hardest decision of my life: I've always done the RIGHT thing, in my life. This time, I was forced to do what was BEST for me -- And what was best for me, was to get the hell out of there, and accept guilt where there wasn't any.

I do not wish anyone to be in such positions. It's sad that people are, on a daily basis.

Well, that's why you get a lawyer -- they should know that stuff. Of course, a public defendant probably doesn't have time or resources to properly research it...

That only helps after you have done something that might be a crime. I asked my lawyer about ignorance of the law and she admitted there are large areas of the law that she is unfamiliar with and she herself has broken some laws unknowingly only to find out later that what she did was in fact illegal.

There's more going on than that. This [npr.org] was a very illuminating article for me. Basically, not only do PD's not get enough resources to properly do their job, they get those resources weather or not they do a proper job at all. This leads to a situation where taking many cases and doing no work on them at all is most adventageous to from the PD's point of view.

So in the case of rape we should just find the accused guilty without a 'pointless' trial rather than permit them the right to have their crimes proven? We're not talking about accused that are going to plead guilty on their own free will, we're talking about accused that are being strong armed into a guilty plea, innocent or not, because it's cheaper.

Plea deals have no benefit. A remorseful criminal that pleads guilty have a lot of benefit. A guilty person who pleas into a lighter sentence and has no remorse does not lead to justice being served. An innocent person who fears they might lose despite their innocence and takes a plea deal into any sentence feels let down by the system and does not lead to justice being served. A guilty person who feels remorse and pleads guilty and takes their just sentence is what you're looking for, and those rarely come out of one side using threats and bargains to get them.

If the rape victim does not want to recount the crime, they can refuse to do so. Of course, if their testimony is the only evidence, the accused goes free - but there's no right to put people in jail without giving them due process, and that kind of thing is a part of it. You can't just say "oh, he did it, but I don't want to talk about it".

Yes, they are published, in huge books that I can read down at the library. I have to start with the Criminal Code Act 1899, then apply all the amendments that have been voted in over the last 100+ years. And then I have to look at verdicts of court cases in my state that establish presidents about how that law is interpreted. After all that I am not sure if I will have enough time for my day job!

So, essentially he argues for a real life denial of service attack. Bombard the system with traffic until it breaks under the load.

I only wonder how the government would push back in such a situation. We've already seen the US government trample over Constitutional in the name of security, terrorism, child pornography, etc. All they need is one case where a child pedo is released due to the systems inability to provide a speedy trial, and we will see another one of our rights taken from us.

In the name of the children... won't you please think of the children?

All they need is one case where a child pedo is released due to the systems inability to provide a speedy trial, and we will see another one of our rights taken from us

Such cases aren't rare at all. It doesn't really happen to bonafide terrorists, but people accused of "child pedo" (which could mean a whole lot of different things with varying degrees of severity) often are released without even a trial.

Criminals are released on technicalities or rights violated by the police all the time. And innocents are imprisoned because they were tricked by the police, didn't understand the situation or couldn't afford a decent lawyer all the time too.

I feel like calling the united states' bluff on how many citizens it's willing to imprison, despite overcrowding, is a bad idea.

Last year, the Supreme Court ordered California to reduce their prison population by ~20% because the conditions violated the 8th amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment

Further, the prolonged recession is and has been causing States to release prisoners from jail early.Without the funding, there just isn't enough money in the budget to pay for mass incarceration.And without even more funding, the court system doesn't have the bandwidth to put more than ~10% of criminal cases in front of a jury.

Occupy should start the Nullify movement - E.G. if you are on a jury refuse to return a guilty verdict for victimless BS charges.

BS charges like for a white man killing a black man in the Deep South? In all those old movies where a bad guy says "No jury will convict me.", jury nullification is exactly what they're talking about. That leads to break down of rule of law, and from there it goes back to lynching and vigilante justice because of lack of trust in the legal system. It works both ways. Sure there are some things I wouldn't mind jury nulification being used on, but there are lots of other things that people will use it for if it becomes an accepted practice.

By that logic we shouldn't have police either - after all a racist cop is quite capable of destroying and/or planting evidence in order to achieve a bogus ruling too. Being human, any system we come up with will be imperfect. But that is not a reason to eliminate a part of our legal system that has been there from the very beginning.

You can get all romantic about the thought of saving some young guy from jail for drugs possession but would you find it so noble if a Klan member got away with murdering an innocent African American youth by his all white jury?

There are a lot more drug persecutions than lynchings these days, so on the balance we're still ahead.

Laws are put into place by people elected by millions of voters

By an extremely flawed process that ensures good policy cannot prevail. From the mathematics of winner takes all voting, to the extraordinary American propaganda machine it's nearly impossible for good policy to prevail against electioneering. Just government is based on the consent of the people, and you can't actually assess the consent of the people with such broken apparatus. It's thus impossible to consider the American government legitimate.

goes against the whole principle of justice being blind.

When you nullify, you're passing judgement on the law, not the defendant.

The problem is we are talking about people's lives here. You want to forfeit your life for a prank or to make a point? OK, thought not. Well, neither do most of the folks currently being given an opportunity to plead to a lesser charge today.

The justice system for the most part sees the scum of the earth and very rarely are these people even technically innocent. They know it and are just interested in doing as little time as they possibly can. They already know the system is broken because they have gotten away with many, many crimes for years before being caught. If it wasn't so badly broken, they would have been caught already.

You see, there is a really simple truth at work here. People know they might get caught but they seriously underestimate the likelyhood of it because based on anecdotal evidence it looks like most people do not get caught. The reality is only about 20% of individual crimes do end up with someone receiving some kind of punishment. But, these are individual crimes - at some point the law of averages catches up with you so on your 40th crime or so it is almost a dead certainity that you are going down for it. The people in the criminal justice system - on the receiving end - do not think this through all they way and see only the few of their friends that are getting caught.

Sure, every once in a while a truely innocent person is hauled into court. At that point they have maybe only a 50/50 chance of escaping undeserved punishment because of the way things work. Would it be nice to fix that? Sure. But to fix it we are going to have to start training children to be more like Beaver and less like Eddie - right now, Eddie is winning out because it looks like he has a lot more fun. Problem is, the Eddies of the world do indeed have more fun but we would really like to live in a world populated with as few Eddies as possible - while it may be fun for Eddie it isn't so much fun for the people around him. We are talking about trying to undo 40 or 50 years of pop culture conditioning and 40 or 50 years of real live experiences in the inner cities of the US.

See, today when you end up in court the guy before you is really guilty and the guy after you is really guilty. The overwhelming number of people are really guilty, so much so that it shades everyone's expectations. Everyone is assumed at one level or another to be guilty because... for the most part they are. If even 1 in 10 was truely innocent there might be a chance of the system being able to recognize an innocent person but they are so incredibly rare as to make it impossible for the people running the system to recognize them. There may be varying shades of guilt, but even with that the number of people in the system that are in fact guilty, know they are guilty and just wanting to get the smallest pain in their life possible makes the plea bargining system work the way it does.

Said that of all his clients, there was only one who he wasn't 100% sure was guilty. That isn't to say some of them didn't get off. One was a kid arrested with Sharpies on his person that the police claimed he used for tagging. He admitted to my friend he had in fact done so. However the search had been illegal, so the case was tossed. Saw the same kid back about 6 months later. This time the police had waited until they'd seen him tagging something, no getting out of that.

This wasn't my friend being an asshole on his assumptions or anything. The one case he was unsure about was the only one where there wasn't direct physical evidence, or an admission, of guilt.

In general, this is what you'd hope. You'd hope that cases would only be brought forward if the prosecution felt there was a good chance the person was guilty. The idea with the justice system isn't to just toss everyone in court and see what sticks. While a high plea rate can be indicative of other problems and we do need to monitor courts for abuses carefully, it can also simply mean that the state is doing its homework. They only press charges when they've got good evidence. The defense gets to see this evidence and tells their client "take the deal."

That is what happened with the kid the second time around. He was initially smug and said "You can get me off again, right?" My friend explained no, this was iron clad open and shut. Take the deal offered because there was no way he was walking away free.

to end the war on drugs. because this would significantly reduce the work-load of the courts and allow them to have more jury trials.

Among the prisoners, drug offenders made up the same percentage of State prisoners in both 1997 and 2004 (21%). The percentage of Federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses declined from 63% in 1997 to 55% in 2004.[8] In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million.

More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury, in part because the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial.

That's a bit misleading no. A prosecutor can threaten to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence but it takes a judge and a jury to impose it. The only reason that to take his threat seriously is because you predict that it's likely that he will prevail at trial. If you think you'll prevail, the threat is totally meaningless -- it's not like the prosecutor can put you in jail of his own accord.

Look, I'm all for better trials (especially in the sense of getting better representation for defendants at the trial level where public defenders are really atrocious) but the idea that plea-bargaining is part of the problem is absurd. Plea bargains are often the most socially effective way of dealing with the most obvious cases. Gee, an officer replied to a DV call of a man beating his wife, comes in and sees a woman with a black eye and a dude that smells of whiskey* -- do we really need a jury to decide that one? Or grand theft auto where the perp is caught in the stolen car.

Those cases abound because the criminals in the justice system are, by selection, the stupider ones: the ones that got caught. It stands to reason that, on average, more of them would be open-and-shut cases that your average crime. Just watch COPS** once to see how blindingly guilty some of these idiots are. The smart criminals are the ones that you don't see and never find and aren't taking plea bargains because of the overwhelming amount of evidence stacked against them.

* This is not a made up anecdote, one of my neighbors served in a rather ho-him middle class suburb and he said that he responded to at least one such case per week, often more and very often with repeat offenders. It depressed him to no end that there was not a "get drunk and hit your wife 20 times in a lifetime and we get to take you out behind the woodshed and knock some sense into you" rule, but that's a different matter.

** Or, as my crim pro prof called it "A 30 minute class on the actual procedure of criminal law that you can watch for free every Saturday".

Gee, an officer replied to a DV call of a man beating his wife, comes in and sees a woman with a black eye and a dude that smells of whiskey* -- do we really need a jury to decide that one? Or grand theft auto where the perp is caught in the stolen car

Yes, we do. We have a right to a trial by a jury. Every one of us. That includes stupid criminals. The alternative, where an officer or a lawyer or anyone else that decides a persons fate without due process is ripe for abuse. Really nasty and bad abuse.

My local municipalities all started sending cops out on fishing expeditions to supplement their income during the recession. One lawyer I talked to said the ticket rates for one city in one month exceeded that for the whole year. They started sweeps for buckled drivers and even drivers license checkpoints. I would've loved to see these drivers making all these cops go to court to defend their tickets.

I find this somewhat offensive. Were these people wearing their seatbelts or not? Were they appropriately licensed or not? "Make them prove it in court!" in many cases sounds exactly like "Yeah, I broke the law, but if I take it to court and waste taxpayers money to pay the cop double time to show up, hope that he doesn't so that I can avoid the responsibility for my actions.".

While in college, I made enemies with the local college police. They had a pretty good reputation for harassment and lack of faith in the constitution, so local lawyers had made themselves available for advice, free of charge, to students in my particular situation. The police would pull me over, ask to search me... my car... they'd roll up on me while I was walking down the street. They'd meet me outside of class to ask me "Questions" regarding topics I had no knowledge of.

The lawyer was very wise and told me a few things:

Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them.

The police are not here to serve and protect. They are here to arrest people. Period. They have special police, called detectives, that gather evidence, but the vast majority of police do one thing and one thing only... arrest people. When talking to a police officer, remember their goal. They are not your friend. They are not there to help. They are there to either arrest you, or someone you know. Why are you helping them arrest you by continuing to talk?

The police do not decide if you are guilty. Often they try to coerce you into giving them more evidence against you, by convincing you that if you admit to something, or let them search you, they will find you more believable. You have NO REASON to care what the police believe. Their opinion is not important. If they have cause to arrest you, you are going to jail. PERIOD. When the police officer walks up to you, they already know if they are going to arrest you or not. Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you in a court of law. By talking or letting them search you, you are simply giving them more evidence... or even giving them a reason to arrest you where one did not exist before.

After speaking with the lawyer, I took his advice. Every time a police officer tried to talk to me, I simply refused. "I'm sorry sir, I have nothing to say to you" if they continued, then I used the lawyers line "Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them." I've used this line dozens of times in my life and I have never had a cop continue to bug me after using it... although several commented that it was clever.

The campus police quickly realized I wasn't going to fall for their games anymore. So they charged me with something I had nothing to do with. I demanded a trial, much to their dismay. They tried numerous times to plead me out. I took it to court and acted as my own lawyer. They actually called several witnesses, none of whom had ever seen me before. The judge threw it out. I gave the prosecutor and police officer the devil horns and winked on the way out. I was never pulled over or questioned again in that town.

The dutch labour party (ex-socialists, now more commonly thought of as bleeding hearts) lost its leader who was the Mayor of Amsterdam during massive budget overruns, a political murder by a Muslim on a critic of Islam, increasing racial tension, race related riots, failure of expensive projects to get the races to live to gether (IJburg) and increased attacks on Homo sexuals by Muslims. Name: Job Cohen... the guy then became leader of labour and was not nearly as successful as a politician in the opositions as you might have thought.

So, they currently have a leadership election and one of the leaders prides himself on having been a street coach for troubled youths... He claims though sentencing is not the answer. What then is the answer is not answered but he claims though sentencing does not stop re-offending. It tells you a lot a because anyone with a working brain cell will realize that the toughest sentence if that of death and dead people seldom re-offend.

Mind you, he has a point. There are a lot of countries in the world and over history an almost infinite variety of methods have been used to deter crime. And not a single one of them really works, no not even the bullet to the head. The Chinese are current masters in it and their crime rate is on in increase. They show weekly interviews with the condemned and in China if you are from a bad area, you don't have a longer life expectenancy on deathrow then you got in your own home, 1 week and you are dead. And as said, the crime rate is on the rise. The US has though sentences and a high crime rate.

Holland has a liberal system AND a high crime rate. Oh, the statistics vary but if you then put them into context such as that the dutch legal system is extremely bad at getting convictions, you have to wonder what the real crime rate.

As for re-offending, almost any system claims something between 70-80% FAILURE RATE and that is ONLY counting those criminals who are successfully tracked at going through the entire legal procedure again leading to a served jailed sentence AGAIN. Oh, if a criminal re-offends but gets killed by the police in full view of a million witnesses who swear he was committing the crime, IT STILL DOES NOT COUNT AS RE-OFFENDING.

Plea bargains, parole, suspended sentences, time served etc etc they are all just patches to make a system that barely works not collapse completely. And we need the system to work because there are areas of the world where the system HAS collapsed and they are not nice places to be. Prove me wrong and move to Somalia or even just Mexico.

And you want to overload this barely functioning machine? If you are in America, you are just living thanks to the believe by Mexicans and blacks that the system will prevent them from just taking what they want. If that ever crumbles, every rich spoiled white/. nerd is going to get it is so bad that they will pray for a jock to pants them one last time before they die. It is lucky the blacks of LA are so dumb they rioted by attacking each other instead of descending enmass on Hollywood and taking out every rich white person thinking that black and hispanic cops are going to risk their lives for their rich asses and you better hope the system keeps that believe in tact.

The system ain't perfect but so far it works. If you want to improve it think real hard whether you are going to survive its destruction. It might be nice to watch an old crappy building being blown up to make space for something new, BUT NOT WHEN YOU ARE STANDING ON TOP OF IT.

Fight the man! It is not a battle cry the man should be using. And unless you suck as a nerd, you are the 1%.

When I was in Chicago, a lawyer friend advised going to court for minor traffic offenses id you had the time - dockets were so overloaded that judges would usually simply dismiss things like an illegal turn simply because they had more important cases to push through, or the cop would often not show up leading to a dismissal. if everyone that got a traffic summons went to court the system would crash almost instantly; which is why fines need to be low enough to get people to say its easier to pay or offer traffic school to keep it off your record.

Many years ago I was in the hospital for several days, for -what turned out to be- salmonella.
Six months after I am out, I get a "final notice" from the hospital for $7500. wtf is this? I never got the first bills. (not an excuse for non-payment but the truth)
Not only that, I had less than a week to pay or they would sue me!

Having no lawyer and no clue how to counter (I didn't have $7500 at the time), I contacted my landlord who had just finished telling me how wonderful this lawyer was that she had found after going through a bunch of shysters.
Contacted the lawyer, laid everything out for him, asked him how much it would cost, he said he would file a response and request a jury trial.
He seemed pretty sure that they would throw up their hands and walk away from it rather than agree to a jury trial.

Sure enough, I never heard a word from them again. Still use the same doctor.
They never sent me another bill, never tried to set up a payment plan, never dinged my credit report
Lawyer's estimate was $350, he ended up charging me $750 before I told him to stop "monitoring" the case and billing me for each time he "checked up on it."

/ymmv//I can see how this would work (or not work) depending on who it was that was suing you. This would not work in all cases.

IAAL in fact I'm a DA. So let me give you some perspective from the other side. If a prosecutor is doing his/her job then if they don't believe someone committed a crime or even if they don't believe there is a likelihood of conviction then they must dismiss the case. I am most proud of the times I have dismissed cases where through further investigatory work or an honest evaluation of the case I found I could not in good conscience proceed. I would hold out my dismissals as some of my greatest achievements even over my convictions of extremely dangerous and evil murderers and rapists. Why is this? Because as a prosecutor you have the ultimate discretion on whether to proceed and your decision is paramount in its effect on peoples lives. My greatest fear would be to prosecute an innocent man but as a prosecutor with morals and who never just settles for taking someone's word for it (unless there word is corroborated by extrinsic evidence) I dig and use my own investigators and review the forensic evidence until I'm satisfied I have the guilty party. Therefore, it is very unlikely for me to convict an innocent person (short of a perfectly executed set up that is near impossible despite what the media would have you believe) especially since I have dismissed cases where I didn't believe the defendant committed the crime or when I didn't believe I could secure a conviction. I sometimes joked with a defense attorney colleague of mine, "if your guy is truly innocent I'm your favorite DA but conversely if your guy did it look out because I'm coming for him/her come hell or high water!" She agreed with my assessment. Now the problem is not every DA is like this, some are in the job just to make their trial bones and then get to the defense side some are lazy and just looking for the paycheck and will use the stiff sentence or habitual counts as a hammer just because they don't want to do the work. But there are a cadre of career prosecutors who like me do it for the right reasons and live up to the higher standards reserved for those who protect the People. I have never minded someone demanding a trial as I enjoyed the process but there is something to be said where the defendant delights in re-victimizing the victim. I once had to sit a watch as a defendant's attorney at his direction cross-examined a sexual assault victim not once not twice but three times due to mistrials and misconduct by the defense and he throughly enjoyed the hell he put her through on each occasion. (on a side note he tied her up cut her clothes off with a knife, held a gun to her head broke her jaw and nose, and then tortured her sexually). We had the evidence from the start and even though there always is the possibility of an acquittal there should be a punitive penalty for exercising your rights when in doing so this type of harm occurs. (second side note the judge witnessed how much the defendant delighted in the pain he both initially caused and the subsequently caused to the victim during the trial and he was sentenced to 48-life in Dept of Corrections. By in large most of my cases are not even close when it comes to guilt or innocence, its just a matter of considering all the factors and coming up with an appropriate plea based on criminal history, age, impact of crime and community safety. I often wonder what would happen if the defense could convince a large majority to demand trials (this would have to be public defenders as most who retain private attys couldn't afford to go to trial) what would happen? The result would be many lower level criminals would get more substantial sentences while taking away prosecutors ability to adequately attend to serious criminals so as a byproduct inevitability some cases where further work and investigation would be necessary to secure a conviction guilty defendants would go free and continue to hurt those we seek to protect causing more victimization and pain to those who are least able to protect themselves. Sorry for the verbosity of my post but I obviously feel strongly about this issue.

Why do we want to crash the government? It's our tool to serve the public good. It's not perfect, but we're better off with it than against it.

In many cases, the government makes matters worse, not better. And nobody proposed "crashing the government." They said crash the "longer sentence for exercising your rights" system. Typical of anti-Libertarians, equate them to anarchists.

Liberal? It's been the Conservatives at the forefront of the "fuck them, imprison them all, especially the n____s and spics" system.

What, you didn't think that sentencing guidelines different for "crack" and "powder" cocaine came out of nowhere did you? Crack is predominantly used by blacks, powder primarily used by the silver-spoon sons of the upper crust. And as for Marijuana, Texas senators are on record, "All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy"; in the Deep South, marijuana bans were a way to discriminate against blacks, and again came up the comments, like "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice."

BULLSHIT The segregationist racist laws of the US South were passed by DEMOCRATS

Yes- conservative Democrats. Liberal = Democrat and Conservative = Republican is a recent turn of events, before the 1960's there were conservative and liberal Republicans, as well as conservative and liberal Democrats.

Mass incarceration isn't a libertarian issue. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, an embarassment to the "land of the free". You should take a look of the reality you live in before you lecture others on naivete.

Oh stop using the word terrorism unless you're talking about a non-government group using terror in order to achieve a political objective. If you can't explain why something is wrong without labelling it as something it's not then I'll assume you're just trying to imply guilt by association.

But that is exaxtly what most governments are doing - creating an environment of fear by constantly reminding us of how vulnerable we are. External terrorism is less common now than it was 30 years ago, and yet we have grandmothers geting grope-frisked going through domestic airports, whole terminals evacuated when someone accidentally leaves their suitcase unattended, and pretty much every muslim on the planet put on notice.

They do this to achieve a political objective of control of the populace, and to help their buddies profit from all of the "preventative" measures.

How does that not satisfy the definition of "using terror to achieve a political objective"

Oh stop using the word terrorism unless you're talking about a non-government group using terror in order to achieve a political objective. If you can't explain why something is wrong without labelling it as something it's not then I'll assume you're just trying to imply guilt by association.

I am a law-abiding citizen. I am also much, much more likely to be harmed in some way or another by my government or someone in their employment that ANY foreign terrorist. At least the government would try to look like they're going after any foreign terrorist who strikes American soil. By contrast, a government agent who harms me in some way (legally or not) is unlikely to ever face a penalty of any kind. Without doing a Google search, when's the last time you recall hearing about a police officer who was prosecuted and put in prison for abusing his power? Do you think they never abuse their power?

You're right, they are not terrorists. Terrorists couldn't do that much damage for that long to that many millions of people in their wildest wet dreams. They are worse than terrorists. They've been that way ever since the statesman was replaced by the career politician.

Returning to the question of being loved or feared, I sum up by saying, that since his being loved depends upon his subjects, while his being feared depends upon himself, a wise Prince should build on what is his own, and not on what rests with others.